AT&T S6 first impressions (now with battery pics/stats)

So I've had the AT&T S6 (non edge) for about 16 hours now and figured I'd give out a few first impressions.

Battery life: I'm not remotely reading to start quoting overall numbers but I charged it to full before I went to bed around 12:00 and when I woke up about 6:30 I was at 94%. This is with all location services on, Bluetooth on and connected to a sports watch, WiFi on and basically everything set to how it came out of the box. I did turn off Voice over LTE. Cell standby was also only at 2% for the night and has staid around the 1%-3% range as of this moment, so the cell standby bug may very well be carrier specific. So far the battery is meeting my expectations and then some. We'll see how the numbers hold up over the next week.

Performance: So far no issues with TouchWiz or general performance. It's clear having high speed storage and RAM has helped and Samsung being able to better tune it's software to it's own processor has made a big difference. I have noticed a slight stutter here and there, but it's nothing worse then I've seen before with Sense on my M8 or on my iPad Air 2 with iOS8, and it's not 100% every single time; more 10% of the time I may see a slight stutter somewhere. Everything is very fluid, but I won't say it's as fast as 5.0.2 on my M8. That thing flew, to the point at time I was selecting the wrong thing by accident because it jumped to a different screen at the slightest touch. I got used to it pretty quick, but I can see Samsung using TouchWiz to calm that down a bit so you're average 35 to 45 year old mother or father or whomever doesn't get 'lost' or frustrated when the phone jumps at every little move. I would not, however, say TouchWiz is slow by any means. It's still much more fluid and faster then KitKat and below but maybe not quite as fast/jumpy as you might find with vanilla Lollipop or something like Sense. As someone who despised TouchWiz before and never owned a Galaxy phone because of it, I have no plan to cover it up or change it.

TouchWiz: Holy Bloat Batman. I'll give Samsung credit, TouchWiz has been simplified in many ways, looks better in many ways while still being unmistakably Samsung, and run much much better, but bloat is still out of hand. Samsung isn't fully to blame for this though, as they only have S Heath and S Voice on the device by default. Even the 2 Microsoft apps (OneNote and Skype) were not bad, and I'll use Skype. However I had close to 20 AT&T applications loaded up, some of which can't even be disabled and I I had to deal with set up prompts for several of them. Samsung is big enough, and with their now strong vertical integration for manufacturing, that they you could start calling them the Apple of Android. It's time they flex their muscle with the carriers and push back against of the bloatware and crappy update times, etc. They don't have to go to the extent of Apple but it's rapidly growing out of hand, on AT&T at least. Out of all the TouchWiz stuff there are only two things I take real issue with. The notification shade sucks and I should be able to remove the brightness settings that I will never touch and to get rid of the Wifi Connected notification that I don't need nor care about. The other things is the app dock at the bottom; I can change all the icons I want except for the app drawer icon. It is locked to the far right and I have no idea why other then 'because reasons'. Android is about freedom, to and extent, and little things like this chip away at that. It's not horrid, but it's an annoyance.

Fingerprint sensor: It sucks, pretty much. I ended up disabling it as it would detect my thumb maybe 2 out of 10 attempts on average. T-Mobile, and I think Sprint, got updates with improvements to the sensor and reviews mentioned it got better with an update so I'm hoping AT&T has a 'day 1' update Friday to help with this. Until then it stays off.

Build: This phone is gorgeous. Store displays and pictures don't do it that much justice until you have yours in hand. It's thin, it's feels amazing, has just enough heft thanks to the metal and glass, and does not get all that warm. That said this phone is glass and it will break. Not to the extent of the iPhone 4 or anything, GG4 is on the tough side, but I don't feel comfortable leaving the phone case-less. I have the sapphire black and it shifts between dark black, dark/navy blue, and just blue. There is the deathstar logo on the back, but it's tiny and meshes well with the black color. The IMEI sticker is a bigger eyesore, but that's not a S6 only thing.

Screen: Gorgeous, bright and pretty much perfect. Not a huge leap over 1080P but I don't have much to say beyond that.

Camera: I don't take many pictures with phones but they few I have taken just as a sample have come out pretty good for a phone camera.

Overall: This is the phone Samsung needed to make as the S5, if not the S4. It has taken everything I could throw at it, and aside from a few minor annoyances, I am more then pleased with this phone. That's saying something. I've hated Galaxy phones with a passion for many years as over bloated, clunky, cheap plastic phones made by a company that just tossed everything and the kitchen sink in and called it a day. Power users who push lots of music and video and steam Netflix and want 7+ hour screen time are likely better served by the Note line, and I think Samsung knows this. For your run of the mill, average user (aka those of use who don't browse Android forums and passionately yell about phones ) I think the S6 will serve very well.

Thanks for the write up. Interesting to hear about the fingerprint scanner as I've heard from many people/reviews that it works great. Are you sure you are doing it properly? I saw one video where a guy was struggling because he kept trying to swipe his finger on it like it was an S5.

Yup, just a direct, light press on the button. I can do it the exact same way 4 times and on the 5th it will finally unlock. Sometimes right on the first try it will do it. I've seen some reviews saying that they had issues with it until an update and then it worked great, so I'm thinking maybe AT&T has an update ready for either tomorrow for the official launch or hopefully soon that helps address it.

I wouldn't call it a major annoyance though, not until Samsung pay comes out, and I'm guessing it's just software related.

Yup, just a direct, light press on the button. I can do it the exact same way 4 times and on the 5th it will finally unlock. Sometimes right on the first try it will do it. I've seen some reviews saying that they had issues with it until an update and then it worked great, so I'm thinking maybe AT&T has an update ready for either tomorrow for the official launch or hopefully soon that helps address it.

I wouldn't call it a major annoyance though, not until Samsung pay comes out, and I'm guessing it's just software related.

I have the AT&T S6 Edge and I've only managed to get the fingerprint sensor to miss twice, and once was definitely my fault. Hopefully that improves for you because it's great having it.

I have the AT&T S6 Edge and I've only managed to get the fingerprint sensor to miss twice, and once was definitely my fault. Hopefully that improves for you because it's great having it.

Posted via Galaxy S6 edge

Hmm, well, I might tinker with it tonight; use different fingers and whatnot. I didn't worry to much, even if there is an issue, it strikes me as a software fixable one since it picked up my print during set up very well.

So I've had the AT&T S6 (non edge) for about 16 hours now and figured I'd give out a few first impressions.

Battery life: I'm not remotely reading to start quoting overall numbers but I charged it to full before I went to bed around 12:00 and when I woke up about 6:30 I was at 94%. This is with all location services on, Bluetooth on and connected to a sports watch, WiFi on and basically everything set to how it came out of the box. I did turn off Voice over LTE. Cell standby was also only at 2% for the night and has staid around the 1%-3% range as of this moment, so the cell standby bug may very well be carrier specific. So far the battery is meeting my expectations and then some. We'll see how the numbers hold up over the next week.

Performance: So far no issues with TouchWiz or general performance. It's clear having high speed storage and RAM has helped and Samsung being able to better tune it's software to it's own processor has made a big difference. I have noticed a slight stutter here and there, but it's nothing worse then I've seen before with Sense on my M8 or on my iPad Air 2 with iOS8, and it's not 100% every single time; more 10% of the time I may see a slight stutter somewhere. Everything is very fluid, but I won't say it's as fast as 5.0.2 on my M8. That thing flew, to the point at time I was selecting the wrong thing by accident because it jumped to a different screen at the slightest touch. I got used to it pretty quick, but I can see Samsung using TouchWiz to calm that down a bit so you're average 35 to 45 year old mother or father or whomever doesn't get 'lost' or frustrated when the phone jumps at every little move. I would not, however, say TouchWiz is slow by any means. It's still much more fluid and faster then KitKat and below but maybe not quite as fast/jumpy as you might find with vanilla Lollipop or something like Sense. As someone who despised TouchWiz before and never owned a Galaxy phone because of it, I have no plan to cover it up or change it.

TouchWiz: Holy Bloat Batman. I'll give Samsung credit, TouchWiz has been simplified in many ways, looks better in many ways while still being unmistakably Samsung, and run much much better, but bloat is still out of hand. Samsung isn't fully to blame for this though, as they only have S Heath and S Voice on the device by default. Even the 2 Microsoft apps (OneNote and Skype) were not bad, and I'll use Skype. However I had close to 20 AT&T applications loaded up, some of which can't even be disabled and I I had to deal with set up prompts for several of them. Samsung is big enough, and with their now strong vertical integration for manufacturing, that they you could start calling them the Apple of Android. It's time they flex their muscle with the carriers and push back against of the bloatware and crappy update times, etc. They don't have to go to the extent of Apple but it's rapidly growing out of hand, on AT&T at least. Out of all the TouchWiz stuff there are only two things I take real issue with. The notification shade sucks and I should be able to remove the brightness settings that I will never touch and to get rid of the Wifi Connected notification that I don't need nor care about. The other things is the app dock at the bottom; I can change all the icons I want except for the app drawer icon. It is locked to the far right and I have no idea why other then 'because reasons'. Android is about freedom, to and extent, and little things like this chip away at that. It's not horrid, but it's an annoyance.

Fingerprint sensor: It sucks, pretty much. I ended up disabling it as it would detect my thumb maybe 2 out of 10 attempts on average. T-Mobile, and I think Sprint, got updates with improvements to the sensor and reviews mentioned it got better with an update so I'm hoping AT&T has a 'day 1' update Friday to help with this. Until then it stays off.

Build: This phone is gorgeous. Store displays and pictures don't do it that much justice until you have yours in hand. It's thin, it's feels amazing, has just enough heft thanks to the metal and glass, and does not get all that warm. That said this phone is glass and it will break. Not to the extent of the iPhone 4 or anything, GG4 is on the tough side, but I don't feel comfortable leaving the phone case-less. I have the sapphire black and it shifts between dark black, dark/navy blue, and just blue. There is the deathstar logo on the back, but it's tiny and meshes well with the black color. The IMEI sticker is a bigger eyesore, but that's not a S6 only thing.

Screen: Gorgeous, bright and pretty much perfect. Not a huge leap over 1080P but I don't have much to say beyond that.

Camera: I don't take many pictures with phones but they few I have taken just as a sample have come out pretty good for a phone camera.

Overall: This is the phone Samsung needed to make as the S5, if not the S4. It has taken everything I could throw at it, and aside from a few minor announces, I am more then pleased with this phone. That's saying something. I've hated Galaxy phones with a passion for many years as over bloated, clunky, cheap plastic phones made by a company that just tossed everything and the kitchen sink in and called it a day. Power users who push lots of music and video and steam Netflix and want 7+ hour screen time are likely better served by the Note line, and I think Samsung knows this. For your run of the mill, average user (aka those of use who don't browse Android forums and passionately yell about phones ) I think the S6 will serve very well.

Thank you for this review.

I definitely won't be using the fingerprint thing. Sounds like a pain.

As far as your icons go... Honestly I plan on using Nova so this won't be an issue. I prefer to control how my phone looks and works so TW launcher has to go (most likely).

That's strange about the fingerprint scanner. Mine has been nearly flawless. I have the T-mobile version so i dont know if that makes a difference but this is the first time out of all the reviews I've read that someone is saying its not working properly. Might be a defect. I'd consider exchanging it if it doesn't improve because honestly its one of the best features of the phone.

You can delete the fingerprint and redo it. I'd hesitate on the defective part, T-Mobile phones got an update day 1 and part of the change was fixes for the fingerprint scanner. I'm holding out that AT&T has something like this too.

It picks up the print perfectly when you're first 'scanning' it in, it's just trying to unlock the phone with it.

I had same issues (and it is frustrating) check out this post:
over on my gripes and grumbles on the S6 Edge, Post #6 has a tip on a way to train the scanner. Sorry I couldn't link the post directly here as my posting count is not high enough,..

By training one thumb on both fingerprint 1 & 2 and the other on 3 & 4. It works every time for me. Regardless if I am holding it up and down or sidewa

I haven't had any issues with the fingerprint reader (AT&T). It's worked as well as my iPhone. The only time I've had any 'issue' is when I've tried to use it and the phone isn't actually locked. Just the screen off/timed out. And it obviously won't work then since the phone is unlocked.

I was hoping to get to 24 with light/moderate use but feel a few hours short. Just plugged in my S6 with 10% remaining for a total of 20 1/2 hours. That beats my old M8 by miles and I sure as hell can't complain about it. I had zero standby issues, didn't even register in the power list. Google Play services sucked up about 16%, which seems high. I just got a slew of updates for preloaded apps on the phone this evening so maybe that will help, or at least in a few days once everything has been syncing and running like normal for a bit it will settle down. Didn't plug the phone expect for 2 or 3 minutes into the computer to make sure Smart Switch worked. I didn't get much screen on time (2h 15m as of right now) but that represents my normal work day use, maybe a bit less then normal since I plugged it in 2 hours before I normally do when I got to bed but I wanted to do a near coplete run down to see how it did before I kicked in with my normal use/charge pattern.

Pictures below and taken at 15% battery; about an hour before I posted this.

I was hoping to get to 24 with light/moderate use but feel a few hours short. Just plugged in my S6 with 10% remaining for a total of 20 1/2 hours. That beats my old M8 by miles and I sure as hell can't complain about it. I had zero standby issues, didn't even register in the power list. Google Play services sucked up about 16%, which seems high. I just got a slew of updates for preloaded apps on the phone this evening so maybe that will help, or at least in a few days once everything has been syncing and running like normal for a bit it will settle down. Didn't plug the phone expect for 2 or 3 minutes into the computer to make sure Smart Switch worked. I didn't get much screen on time (2h 15m as of right now) but that represents my normal work day use, maybe a bit less then normal since I plugged it in 2 hours before I normally do when I got to bed but I wanted to do a near coplete run down to see how it did before I kicked in with my normal use/charge pattern.

Pictures below and taken at 15% battery; about an hour before I posted this.

Are you on auto brightness? Animation settings at default? Disabled apps? What carrier?

Are you on auto brightness? Animation settings at default? Disabled apps? What carrier?

Auto brightness 99% of the time. I took 5 minutes and tinkered with the brightness setting to see how bright it got at full (very bright), animation set at default, disabled everything AT&T that I was allowed to; AT&T actually won't let you disable 2 of their apps, OneNote, S Voice, Facebook Messenger, Pages Manager, Uber and Lookout.

This is pretty much pull out of box, set up, charge and use. Other then the disabled apps, turning off the ability for apps to scan for WiFi and turning off voice over LTE, I left everything else alone.

I was hoping to get to 24 with light/moderate use but feel a few hours short. Just plugged in my S6 with 10% remaining for a total of 20 1/2 hours. That beats my old M8 by miles and I sure as hell can't complain about it. I had zero standby issues, didn't even register in the power list. Google Play services sucked up about 16%, which seems high. I just got a slew of updates for preloaded apps on the phone this evening so maybe that will help, or at least in a few days once everything has been syncing and running like normal for a bit it will settle down. Didn't plug the phone expect for 2 or 3 minutes into the computer to make sure Smart Switch worked. I didn't get much screen on time (2h 15m as of right now) but that represents my normal work day use, maybe a bit less then normal since I plugged it in 2 hours before I normally do when I got to bed but I wanted to do a near coplete run down to see how it did before I kicked in with my normal use/charge pattern.

Pictures below and taken at 15% battery; about an hour before I posted this.

Were you doing a lot of audio streaming or downloads or something? Just curious because your screen time seems low but Google services seem high and to me this sounds like a lot of work was being done while the screen was off.

Were you doing a lot of audio streaming or downloads or something? Just curious because your screen time seems low but Google services seem high and to me this sounds like a lot of work was being done while the screen was off.

Nope, no streaming and no real downloads until late in the day. I'm thinking maybe there was a lot of stuff syncing and updating in the background as everything gets settled so if it keeps up over the next few days I'll poke around and see if I can stop it from sucking battery like ti did. My M8 had that to, so I'm thinking maybe its more a lollipop thing.

the only thing i hate is the NFC logo on the AT&T version. wish they would just hide it

Are you talking about the Att logo or the sticker .

You can take the sticker off, your ID is in your phone and on your box. It comes off real easy. It was the first thing I did before turning phone on. If your talking about the Att globe logo, it is not that bad on the black sapphire atleast